Italian Opera [Fourth Article — Rossini and Others]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 5 January 1828, p. [279]. Never reprinted. The anecdote, ‘not generally known’, about ‘the Rev. William Leeves, of Wrington, near Bath’, indicates De Quincey, and corroborates the evidence in the previous articles on ‘Italian Opera’. In his later writings, De Quincey recalls visiting ‘the beautiful valley of Wrington’ in the south of England, where his mother lived from about 1808; among the writers De Quincey met at Wrington, around 1813, was a certain ‘Rev. Doctor’ who ‘boast[ed]’ to him ‘of his literary acquaintances’ (Vol. 19). It is unlikely that anyone else at the Post would have known about Wrington, or its literary society. ‘Auld Robin Gray’ is a Scottish ballad, yet this critic introduces it as one of ‘Two English songs’. The dashes, italics, and metaphors, the line from Hamlet, and colloquialisms like ‘chop-fallen’ and ‘puzzler’, also point to De Quincey. Moreover, the second sentence is linked to the previous essays on opera, in its ‘comparison’ of this latest concert with ‘the previous representations’. ‘Bartholomew Fair quackery’ (in the last paragraph) anticipates the epithet ‘Bartholomew-Fair Band’, used in a similar musical context in the article on ‘De Begnis’ Concert’, four weeks later in the Post (see below, pp. 259–60); both phrases imply an English perspective.